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We have come to a few notable mile markers on our trip thus far. We have completed our second year of boatschool and the required annual testing and have submitted the kids’ test scores to the school district all rule following and legal like. We have officially been gone for one year and we have traveled about 3,000 nautical miles exploring the west coast and Baja Mexico. We have learned a lot about Mexican culture, travel, and have grown as a family and as individuals.

The kids had their birthdays and we celebrated Jake with Sushi and the movie Cars 3 (in Spanish) in a luxury air conditioned theater with seat side waiters to bring us our snacks. Sarah chose a bar-b-que restaurant for burgers where they grill in the front end of an old chevy truck and had the most disgusting store bought beautiful but inedible chocolate cake. We saved the chocolate bars that surrounded the cake and fed the rest to the fish…(hope they liked it).

We are looking forward to boatschool in the fall when we will be continuing with our Mystery of History Volume III, Life of Fred Math, The Way Things Work Now for Science, translating Spanish Children’s books for Spanish language, and using the DK Book Help Your Kids with Language Arts with some continued work on mastering essay writing. The kids are reading a variety of books for their personal reading as well.

It is hard to believe that we have been gone for an entire year! We have had some grand adventures and certainly some trials but we have worked together to accomplish a lot of projects and repairs and we are feeling pretty good about the boat and all systems aboard. Darius has been able to relax a bit and focus more on wearing his socializing straw hat and his captain’s hat and less on wearing his engineer hat.

We have been working on wellness as a family and have seen some great changes come about due to a focus on eating a more plant based diet. We have shed some pounds and rid ourselves of some allergies and are just generally feeling better overall. We have struggled a bit to find healthy delicious vegetables and meat alternatives that would be so easily found in all of the grocery stores at home, but have decided that sticking to the basic veggies we can find and lots of rice and beans works well in this culture. We will head out in just a few minutes to gather a few groceries in a village that we just pulled into that has only a few small “tiendas” or corner stores. Wish us luck…

So, summer in Mexico is no joke… it is 94 degrees outside and 112 degrees in the boat at anchor. We bought an air conditioner that we can use in the middle of the day when we have the generator running but that costs a lot in fuel that is fairly expensive and sometimes hard to come by , logistically. We have been getting our exercise by walking for what we need from town and by swimming…lots and lots of swimming, and a bit of early morning of late at night dock or beach yoga.

We have had amazing interactions with many local Mexican people. Darius never fails to initiate conversations and we have been invited to share in some parties and family gatherings and have found awesome people sitting around campfires on the beach or at birthday parties or wherever we have involved ourselves in the Mexican culture. We were just saying to each other that everywhere we go the people are amazingly friendly and helpful and they go out of their way to show us their hospitality. We have truly found a beautiful culture of happy, loving, family oriented people.

It has been such a pleasure to explore Mexico for six months that we are crossing the border and re-entering the country to renew our visas for another six months. We are traveling as far north into the Sea of Cortez as possible and crossing the border by bus at Nogales and going to visit Jeremy and Anna and our baby Isabella in Tucson where they are relocating to. We are going to head slowly down the mainland coast of Mexico for the next six months and then on to Guatemala, Panama, and Costa Rica, and then we’ll decide on our next leg.

We have taken a bit of time to “discover new or hidden talents and interests amongst ourselves and have enjoyed seeing those play out and unfold for each of us. I have been able to lead us down a more healthy, nutritious, active path and am loving the time I have to spend on my family, Darius is loving the chances he gets to encounter others and share stories and love and encouragement with them and he is going to spend more time playing guitar and writing us some more original music. Sarah is exercising her creative mind in ways we can only begin to touch on from being a bank teller today with her homemade cardboard laptop computer and teller cage and debit cards to establishing the Fun Never Ends Summer Club that she franchised out to her sister, Allie who is to be hosting an equally amazing fun club in Olympia, sharing a fun filled daily schedule and routine.

Finally, Jake has joined a couple of minecraft factions and has been building all sorts of amazing spawners and machines and even has a store that is stocked with crafted items. So much fun and learning and personal growth we have to be thankful for.

We want to thank all of the Members of the HabiHoba Group on Facebook and say hello and we love you to all of our friends and family and know that we are thinking of all of you and we miss you but also to let you know that we feel truly blessed to be able to take this trip and experience the love , life, and adventures that God has waiting for us in this great creation as we share the good news along our way.

Hey Guys, Hows It Goin? Well, we have to renew our Mexico visas and to do that you have to leave the country and then come back. I have no idea why that,s the law, it doesn’t make much since but we still have to do it so we departed the great Mexican city of La Paz about two weeks ago to head north towards Puerto Panasco. That’s the closest Marina to the border where we have to leave the vessel and bus across to the states. My brother Jeremy, his wife, and his daughter are moving to Arizona soon and we hope to visit them while we’re in the US. Mostly I’m excited to see my niece Isabella since she was born shortly before we left on this journey so we only got to see her a tiny bit.

When we first left La Paz we revisited Ensenada Grande on the island and headed north from there to Los Candeleros, we did some snorkeling but there wasnt much there so we only stayed for a night to get some rest. We met Waponi Woo from La Paz at Bahia Chuenque where they delivered our freezer foot to us by water… literally, Ryan swam it to us. We all chuckled a bit as we watched him swim over with the foot in the air. From Chuenque we went to Loreto which was a medium sized city with lots of people. The fan for our fridge stopped working and that,s super important so we had to get a couple new ones to replace it and have an extra as well. I also purchased a new fishing lure at a local fishing store “Ferremar”. We stayed at Loreto for probably three or four days and took off. Our next destination was Caleta San Juanico. We read in the “Sea of Cortez” cruisers guide that there was a cruisers shrine at San Juanico where people hang there signs and creations showing they came to this bay at a certain time and we had to hang ours to. We carved in a little board our vessel, names, and the date. We all loaded into the dinghy and cruised over to the beach where Sarah lost her glasses… twice! Luckily we found them both times even if it took a trip to the boat and back to get masks. We left that bay after a few days and headed to Bahia Santa Domingo. We went to the rocky beaches and took a couple pictures but that was it there wasn’t much else to explore at that bay so we stayed for only two days before we got pretty bored. After Santa Domingo, we went to Bahia Concepcion, a very pretty bay that many different people from all over come to camp, fish, and swim at the beautiful beaches it offers, but unfortunately we didn’t stay very long. We got there late at night and left early the next morning to another popular vacation spot, Santa Rosalia. We had a wonderful time there, we met a nice man named Sal who spoke very good English and he invited us to a traditional Mexican birthday party for his uncle on Saturday, we couldn’t pass that up so we payed the Fonatur Marina for a week. The marina had WiFi connection so although it may have been a pretty bad connection, it was good enough for me to play Minecraft with some friends on an online server. When Saturday came along Saul told us he would pick us up from the parking lot to take us to the party at 3:00 so we went up there and we waited and waited for two hours just sitting there in the sun and he finally called and told us he wasn’t gonna be there to pick us up until 6:00. *Siiigghhhhh* So we headed back down to the Air Conditioned boat and waited longer. After a while we heard a knock on the boat and we knew it was him so we grabbed our stuff again and headed back up the dock and the steep ramp and hopped into his Volkswagen Beetle. It felt like a clown car as we all stuffed inside this tiny thing and drove off to his house and sat while slowly more and more of his family members drove in. They had a Pinata and really good food and the party went late into the night, it was a blast. Sadly, we had to leave the next morning so we untied the lines and pushed off. We motor sailed because there wasn’t much wind so we weren’t gonna get very far just sailing. I threw in my new lure and waited hoping to catch a fish, we haven’t caught anything for a while so I was eager to get something. Usually these passages are pretty boring, but this one wasn’t so bad because within 30 minutes we had a fish on the line. “Fiiish Ooooon”, as soon as I set the hook the fish jumped out of the water and I saw its blue and green colors. It was a Mahi Mahi, a species I hadn’t yet caught on this trip. I was so excited to get it on board and eat it for lunch, it fought very well for only being only five pounds or so which was perfect for our family, so we cleaned it and through it in the freezer to eat later. We still had room for more so I threw in the line again and only 20 minutes later there was another on the line, they liked that lure. This one was about three or four pounds more then the last one and Sarah fought this one, once she got it up close my dad and I took over, it was really heavy but we got it on board and cleaned that one as well. Now we’ve got alot of Mahi on board to eat.We arrived at Bahia De Los Angelas at night and the next day we ate some Mahi for lunch. It was delicious and I ate it with ceviche, a salsa like recipe for putting on different kinds of meat. It had been suggested to us by other fisherman and boaters several times and I can see why they suggested it. Bahia De Los Angelas is a small city and has plenty of tiendas to prevision, there’s two Pemex stations to get fuel which we had to do. The two fuel stations took quite a walk to get to so my mom and I walked there that evening with our cart to fill four jerry cans and haul back to the boat with the walker bay dinghy. It took a few hours but we got it done and came back with popsicles to suck on when we got back. Today we left Bahia De Los Angelas and we are now heading to the anchorage called Puerto Refugio to swim a bit and eat lunch. Hopefully we make it, but that’s all for now…
so until next time,
HABI HOBA:)

Hey everyone! After we left La Paz we headed to a bunch more anchorages up the west side of the Sea of Cortez. First we went to Los Candeleros and did a bit of snorkeling. Then we mosied on up to Bahia Chenque. There we found Waponi Woo and Ryan swam to us and gave us a freezer foot because ours broke. After that we swooped in to Loreto and we got ice cream and we tried those styrofoam chips that look like wheels. My dad got a part for the boat but I can’t remember what it was. There was a restaurant that we went to and we took a picture in front of the colorful Loreto sign. I was sneezing the whole time we were there so I think I’m allergic to Loreto. Shortly after that we set off for Caleta San Juanico and that was a fun place. We swam all the way to shore and there was a shrine tree and we put our plaque in the tree as well. Later we traveled to Bahia Conception and all we did there was catch some zzzzzs. We left the next day and made our way to Santa Rosalia which is actually a marina. The docks were really slim and the wifi was good and there was a pool and a nearby park. We stayed at Santa Rosalia for nine days and it was fun.
Once we left we went to another anchorage called Bahia De Los Angeles and got gas. We snorkeled at Puerto Refugio and that was fun. Then we left again to Bahia Wilard and just spent the night zzzz then left to go to Bahia San Felipe and that is a marina. That’s where we are right now and we haven’t done anything yet but its not a very good marina because it has bird poop everywhere and smells really bad. That’s all we’ve done so far so untill next time,⚓Habi Hoba⚓
Sarah G Dayton